


and hungry I come and go

by JaqofSpades



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 18:10:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3497930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie Matheson was going to be the death of him. He'd put it down to battle sense, the way their eyes would linger whenever they crossed paths. Silent communication, he told himself, but it's getting harder and harder to deny the truth. There's friendship there, and forgiveness, two things he never expected from her.  But it’s the other thing that has him so tangled up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and hungry I come and go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [romeokijai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/romeokijai/gifts).



> For romeokijai, in the hope this will cheer her up, though my muse has an odd idea of fluffy, sorry. Title, and some general inspiration, drawn from Neruda’s Sonnet XI, specifically the final stanza: ‘and hungry I come and go sniffing the twilight/looking for you, looking for your hot heart/like a puma in the solitude of Quitratue’.

Bass throws the wad of intel against the wall and curses the day he ever agreed to do this shit again. Grain crisis, coal crisis, cocksucker war clans raiding his supply lines in every fucking direction – if Miles can't do something about the blatant fucking disregard of the treaty, he'd give the order to burn the fuckers out.

Least nobody would be saying General Monroe had gone soft then. (He could force them to call him President. He just doesn't care enough to bother.)

He's trying not to drink before dinner these days, but five fucking o'clock would just have to do today. In fact – cancel fucking dinner. Miles is still in Austin, probably completely soused by now, and he's got no desire to stare at Rachel Matheson across the table. Specially when he can't keep his gaze from wandering to Charlie.

That girl's going to be the death of him. He'd put it down to battle sense, the way their eyes would linger whenever they crossed paths. Silent communication, he told himself, but it's getting harder and harder to deny the truth. There's friendship there, and forgiveness, two things he never expected from her. But it’s the other thing that has him so fucking tangled up.

Lust. Charlie Matheson has been eyeing him as if she wants to drag that unruly tongue of hers over every square inch of his body. He’d managed to dismiss it as a girlish crush, telling himself it was natural given they’d spent so much time together over the past few years, but … there was nothing girlish about Charlie any more. She was all fierce lines and fiery challenge, and right now, all of that seemed to be focused on seducing him.

He’s burning to tell her he’s been aching for her for years, but stops himself when he realises that this thing might actually _happen_ if he does. He’s done taking Miles into account, and Charlie won’t listen to Rachel worth a damn, so why the hell should he? It’s sobering, because she’s a Matheson and if he had half a brain he would have locked them all up somewhere, magnets for trouble that they are. But instead, he’s got two of them at his dinner table and another as his emissary to Blanchard and then Mrs C had served up chocolate mousse for dessert last night and he is Just. So. Fucked.

Rachel had turned up her nose and icily requested she be excused, leaving the two of them at the table, gazes locked from the very first spoonful. Charlie had not let even the tiniest trace of the sinful dessert escape, licking it off her lips and scraping the bowl with her spoon. Then she’d winked at him and abandoned the spoon altogether to run her finger around the rim. His cock had been saluting by the time she’d raised a brow at his half-finished serving, and he’d pushed his bowl towards her without a word.

“You always know exactly what I want, don’t you Bass,” Charlie had thrown down, and he was still thinking about that when she lifted the dessert-laden spoon to his lips. He’d been too distracted to enjoy the rich flavour; his eyes had locked on the delicate pulse in her wrist, the faint tracery of her veins under skin so luminescent it made him want to beg for a taste.

But General Monroe doesn’t beg for a goddamn thing, so he’d guided the spoon to her own mouth instead and waited until she had swallowed to fire his parting shot.

“It’s not hard, Charlotte. Mathesons always want whatever belongs to someone else,” he’d pronounced coldly, ignoring the hurt that had flashed in her eyes. It’s safer for everyone if he listens to part of him that is terrified of what might happen if she gets what she wants, then decides she no longer wants it.

She had pushed her chin in the air and snarled her goodnight, and he hadn’t seen her since, hasn’t heard her liquid tread, hasn’t smelt the sunshine of her skin. He hadn’t noticed his decline into madness last time, either, he reminds himself. Maybe that’s all this is.

He'd woken twice last night, soaked in sweat and twisting in his sheets, ready to fucking swear he could taste her. His sick little crush on Charlotte Matheson had ballooned into a full-blown obsession, he can admit to himself in the dark hours. While he'd become a master of restraint during the day, the hours between midnight and 0500 were pure torture. Just jerking off to the memory of her smile over dinner was no longer enough – he had to torture himself with what that smile might have _meant_. 

Had to torture himself with the fact there were ten long strides between his bedroom door and hers, though her shorter legs sometimes made it eleven. And the quiet rise and fall of her breath as she crossed the hall was nothing, a simple pause on her way to the bathroom, or the kitchen.

He couldn’t let himself believe that she had stood outside his door for long minutes while he hovered just feet away, too tense to breathe, knowing that if she knocked, he would open it for her, and they might not make it back to the bed.

She had never knocked, and he had never opened, and his day had been a succession of small cuts, each disappointment stinging a little more, until he was so hungry for her, he wants to bellow with fury. So he hides in his library and applies himself to getting drunk instead.

He has barely altered the tidemark on the bottle when she waltzes in to tell him she refuses to eat alone.

“So eat with your bitch of a mother, then,” he sneers, happy at how the crudity makes her blink. He’d been keeping his venom towards Rachel under wraps since he’d invited her to join him in running the Northern Republic; now he sounds just like the man he used to be.

(“You always told me the truth,” she’d shrugged when he’d asked her how the hell she’d managed to stop hating him. “You looked out for me – more than my mom ever did, and even Miles, in the end. You grew on me,” she’d shrugged, not quite meeting his eyes, but that admission had tricked them into a stare where other, scarier truths had lurked. They’d skittered away from each other like spooked cats, that day.)

“It’s not going to work, you know.”

He looks up from his glass, genuinely bamboozled.

“You trying to scare me away by being big, bad Monroe. Probably do the opposite.” She drifts closer, and takes the tumbler out of his hands, sliding her tongue around the rim of the glass to savour the flavour before taking a sip.

“Though I gotta admit, General Monroe has better whiskey. And sometimes, when he looks at me, it’s like my friend Monroe, my partner, he’s still here. And not trying to run out on me.”

Her honesty leaves a lump in his throat. It also demands his own.

“I can’t – be with you, Charlie. I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to, but … we wouldn’t be a good thing. I’m not a good gamble,” he admits, knowing he’s exposed his belly to the best hunter he’s ever met.

“I know,” she says, and the truth is right there in the bright blue eyes she inherited from the father his men slaughtered, the eyes she shared with the brother who died fighting him. She does know. She knows him better than anyone else bar Miles – and in some ways, might even know him better. And that hand sliding onto his shoulder, that leg suddenly straddling his thigh, the warm weight of her pushing him into the chair – these things say she wants him anyway. He stumbles over the words, needing her to understand before her nearness takes its toll on his fast-vanishing self control.

“If you – don’t – I won’t be able to let you go,” he tries to warn her, hands already tangling in her hair as his lips trace the plane of her cheekbone. “I’m a fucking obsessive, Charlie. What I did to Miles – that’s nothing compared to what I’ll do to you,” he snarls, unable to stop his hands from fisting in the golden tumble of her hair. 

She gasps, and bucks into him before she can refocus on his face. “So, make sure I never want to leave,” she says, as if it’s a little thing, an easy thing. But looking down at her glowing face, remembering the way she’d stepped in front of Miles and begged her Mom, and stared down Duncan and trusted, even after he’d stomped away – maybe it is, he considers for the first time. Maybe it could be.

After years spent fasting, the feast she lays out for him has him too dazzled to move. So it’s Charlie who lowers her mouth to his, and traces his lips with her tongue. Charlie who presses inside, and strokes him as he sits, seemingly frozen.

Then erupts. 

The buttons on her jeans clatter on the wooden floorboards as he rips them open, tearing their mouths apart to bite his way down the side of her neck and plunge his face into the uplifted valley of her breasts. His fingers immediately burrow into her wetness, the warm clutch around his hand reassuring him that this isn’t just another dream. He’s tasted her in his dreams before, but the feel of her, her slick muscles dragging at his fingers, the inferno of her body waiting to scorch him to cinders – that’s new, and undeniably real.

As is the babble of sound that leaves her lips. He barely flicks her clit before she starts to fill the air with the sort of language she’d learnt from him and Miles on the road, words he’d forgotten his most promising diplomat actually knew. She was that girl in his dreams, sweet smile, soft voice, but reality is a string of curses from the soldier who’d had his back, and the breathless demands of the girl who’d tried to kill him on the road.

“Fuck. Motherfucker. You have to stop Monroe, I need -” her body clamps down on the three fingers he has buried inside of her, the ripples of her sex merely a prelude to the undulations of her body as she tries to shove more of him inside her, “oh God, fuck you Monroe, _please_ ,” as she grinds down. He simply drags his thumb over her clit again, setting off a second round of explosions, desperate to see her face contort once more.

He tastes her, later, hungry. They kiss, ravenous, as their hands strip each other of the clothing they’d neglected that first time, three years of self-denial roasting them in an inferno of need. They fuck like the animals they surely are, and worship each other with the rapture of long-lost lovers reunited, every midnight wish and sunlit daydream satisfied in an orgy of feasting.

Monroe knows he’ll burn, shrivelled to a crisp in the face of that blazing Matheson heart, but it doesn’t frighten him anymore. It makes him want to fall to his knees and pledge every last part of him to her, every shop-soiled bit of love and loyalty and trust and blind faith he has left. So he does.

Charlie pledges it right back, and when she needs to leave, they go together. 

(He hates this shit anyway, and his mother-in-law can damn well take her turn at running a country since she’s still bitching about how badly he’d fucked it up last time.)

_fin_


End file.
